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Posts Tagged with “eclipse”

May 28, 2008
6 Comments

e4 Summit from the eyes of a committer

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The e4 summit happened in Ottawa recently. The summit was great in so many ways, it goes to show you the amount of passion certain people have for moving Eclipse forward. A lot of credit goes to the Platform team for really putting stuff together and opening things up. A personal highlight of the summit for me was having great people like McQ bare his soul on the future longevity of Eclipse.

There has been some recent chatter about what went on at the e4 summit, but I think it’s hard for someone to really say something if they weren’t there. Sure, the wiki has some information but it doesn’t tell the complete story. I think the main thing that was accomplished was opening things up and getting the community excited about the future of the Eclipse platform. The mission statement that most people agreed with at the summit was that e4 was, “the next generation platform for pervasive, component-based applications and tools.”

As for my personal takeaways:

  • It was cool to see Adobe there and their interest in the SWT Mac Cocoa port
  • The ability to style Eclipse is important to everyone… let’s bring sexy back
  • Macro recording will become a reality, look for prototypes soon in e4
  • EMF isn’t so bad 🙂
  • Multi-lingual plug-ins need to happen… possible PDE/JSDT integration
  • A lot of people care about flexible resources… look for it to become real
  • The OSGi component model is cool… it needs to be brought to other domains
  • I learned a lot from Steve Northover… especially about the Hydra

A lot more things happened, but that’s what currently sticks in my mind. On the whole, expect to see some good things happening out of e4… and remember… there should be nothing stopping you from getting involved… the door is open…

Want to get involved?

Sign up on the mailing list and state your interest! It’s that easy.

May 27, 2008
30 Comments

Mac-tastic

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So, I finally broke down and bought a macbook pro:

I’m slowly adapting to a life without home and end keys. It also took me awhile to figure out how to disable the crazy default setting of having the function keys not act like standard function keys (F5 is for refresh, not for decreasing screen brightness!). I managed to download Quicksilver which is pretty cool. I have Firefox and Thunderbird for my browsing and newsgroup needs.

On the brightside, I should be able to tackle Mac bugs in an easier fashion instead of begging Kim Horne to look at issues. I also see the opportunity to make PDE a first-class Mac citizen when it comes to building products. I’d like to see fancy .dmg type things come out of product export (with customization of course) to make it easier to develop Eclipse-based products in the Mac world.

Finally, anyone have tips for a new Mac user, especially one who spends the majority of his time inside Eclipse?

May 26, 2008
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Eclipse Summit Europe 2008 CFP

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I just noticed the Call for Papers was announced for Eclipse Summit Europe 2008. It looks like another trip to Germany for me in the near future if my talk gets accepted. It’s always good to catch up with the European Eclipse community along with Ralph Muller’s antics.

Anyways, what are you waiting for… go submit a talk!

May 25, 2008
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Eclipse Time 2008

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One of my favorite PDE contributors, Benjamin Cabé from Anyware Technologies, is helping to host Eclipse Time 2008:

If you’re in the Toulouse area around May 29th and part of the French Eclipse community, please attend!

May 22, 2008
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e4 summit inside Eclipse

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I received this screenshot from Scott Lewis from the ECF team:

“Eclipse community hard at work on e4”

May 21, 2008
2 Comments

Eclipse Embedded space doing well…

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I just saw a press release fly through my inbox from Express Logic.

Express Logic, Inc., the worldwide leader in royalty-free real-time operating systems (RTOS), announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, an open-source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.

“We’re excited to become part of the open-source community through membership in the Eclipse Foundation,” commented William E. Lamie, president of Express Logic. “Our initial impression has been outstandingly positive, and we’ve been greeted with offers of cooperation and assistance from the community that are most refreshing. Our initial efforts have already resulted in the introduction of a commercial product based on Eclipse, our BenchXâ„¢ IDE, which has recently won awards from VDC and eg3.com. We plan to work with the other members of the Eclipse Foundation to help strengthen the Eclipse ecosystem with our particular emphasis on benefits to embedded developers.”

Kudos to the embedded Eclipse community and especially those guys behind the CDT and DSDP projects to make things grow so quickly.

May 21, 2008
10 Comments

How am I supposed to find that?

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I was talking with a colleague of mine today who is starting to have his company move their tool-suite to Eclipse. He asked me to review the UI a bit so I gladly did. I noticed quite a few things that bothered me but basically all the things that bothered me had a common theme. Let’s take the properties view for example:

What I saw was quite a few custom properties views that all tried to get around the deficiencies in the basic properties view. One example was even striking because it was Eclipse Forms based. I than told my colleague about the tabbed properties view in Eclipse:

His response was pretty much, “well, how am I supposed to know that exists?” It’s a fair response given the breadth of technology that is available for you when building Eclipse-based applications. One question we should put forward when diving into E4 is how do we combat this issue? Is it a lack of pre-canned templates for people to use? A lack of books or articles? I’m not sure but this problem is close to my heart as my main interest in E4 is making the life of plug-in developers easier.

Food for thought I guess 🙂

May 17, 2008
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Mentoring is fun…

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I get a big kick out of mentoring students, you learn a lot about yourself and in my case, have the opportunity to selfishly spread the Eclipse love. My first experience in remote student mentoring was with Remy Suen two years ago and I have improved my technique a bit (sorry for you being the guinea pig Remy ;p). One of my students (Rafael) this summer in the GSOC program has been working on the Declarative Services tooling in the PDE incubator.

How did we get started? The first thing I did was stub some code out for Rafael. I create three skeleton plug-ins representing core, ui and tests pieces. I introduced him to project sets which make it a bit easier to checkout the code into your workspace. After that, I started to create a basic plan for him to follow using bugzilla defects. He also started to follow the PDE Incubators inbox to triage bugs when they came in (that’s a very good committer skill to have ;p). I then introduced Rafael to Mylyn and EclEmma to help his workflow a bit:

With those tools installed, you get a better idea of what needs to be done (via Mylyn) and also the current code coverage (via EclEmma). We have been able to move faster with these tools installed towards our goal of having a nice and shiny Declarative Services editor in Eclipse. This wouldn’t be possible without the extensive set of tools available in the Eclipse ecosystem.

So feel free to spread the Eclipse love and show any students (or colleagues) some of the cool tools you’re using in Eclipse to improve your workflow.

May 16, 2008
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Eclipse on ski lifts?

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The Eclipse Foundation does a great job with its case studies to see how Eclipse technology is used in the real world. There is a new case study that is of particular interest to me because it involves Equinox and ski lifts.

I hope people are beginning to understand that Eclipse is no longer about just IDEs and tooling, there is a lot of people out there using Eclipse as a runtime technology. The Eclipse Runtime (RT) project will help to formalize things even more.

On a side note, I’d probably be willing to install Eclipse technology at Whistler mountain for room, board and a ski pass 🙂

May 13, 2008
42 Comments

Changes…

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I just wanted to let everyone know that this is my last week with IBM. I have decided to pursue life as an independent and to the delight of the Eclipse Platform UI team, my choice doesn’t involve apple farming or going to an ashram (inside joke).

I hear life as an independent is fun, you get to hold signs like this…

In reality, my personal mission has always been to make Eclipse/OSGi as successful as possible. I just have decided to spread the Eclipse/OSGi love as an independent.

It’s been a true pleasure working with everyone and seeing Eclipse grow over the years. For now, I plan to continue to get Eclipse 3.4 out the door. Also, I will still be attending the E4 Summit next week for those who want to grab a beer. I think e4 is very important to the success of Eclipse and I will remain involved there.

On a side note, for those in the Boston area this weekend, let me know if you want to discuss open-source and Eclipse over a frosty beverage 🙂

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